THE ACHERON CHRONICLES
By Joe McCreavy
“The mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,”
-John Milton, Paradise Lost
Chapter One:
REBIRTH
(December 2nd, 2084)
The cold tile floor was hardly a substitute for the warm bed the young man preferred. As he lay there in the remains of the abandoned chapel, the morning sunlight pierced through the shattered stain glass windows and blazed down upon him. Irritated by the glow, he turned over onto his side, realized the sun wasn’t going to let him be, and then slowly began to sit up.
Scratching his head in a daze, he gathered his thoughts and remembered where he was. His eyes slowly adjusting to the brightness, he glanced around what had once been a beautiful catholic church. He was sitting up at the front of the shrine, where the priest would have spoken to the Sunday morning audience and performed communion. The building was gargantuan and several hundred people could have attended mass there every week.
But that would have been a long time ago. Decades. No one had been here in ages. Dust and cobwebs seemed to occupy every square inch of the church. Now, this supposed ‘House of God’ only served as a shelter for spiders and vermin, as well as a refuge for the young teen who had stumbled inside during the storm that evening. Drowsy as he was, the boy noticed that a small puddle had formed nearby from the rain leaking in through the crevasses in the ceiling. He leaned towards it and began to lightly splash his face.
Staring back at him through the rippling pool of water was a 16 year old boy. He donned a head of messy, unkempt and uncut brown hair and a pair of icy blue eyes. Both of his ears were pierced and it was evident that a razor hadn’t touched his face within the last few days. A silver locket dangled from his neck, the chain rusted and corroded. His expression in the puddle was blank and apathetic.
He cleaned off his damp hands on his greasy white T-shirt, then turned around and grabbed his worn-out, raggedy backpack that he had tossed aside upon entering the church. After unzipping it, he pulled out his black leather jacket and quickly slid it on. Reaching further into his pack, he retrieved a second item; A sleek, silver pistol. He examined it, turning it over in his hands. The revolver could hold up to twelve rounds. Within this gun, eleven shots remained. One had been fired already.
He tucked the pistol into the back of his pants and concealed it with the end of his jacket. Peering into his bag again, he observed several other personal possessions of his: A Swiss-Army knife and dropped it into his pants pocket… Looking into the bag again, another object caught his eye. Giving a heavy sign, he slowly reached in and pulled it out, holding it level with his face.
It was a child’s toy; A stuffed elephant. It was a purplish-pink color, faded with age. It had been torn and sewn together many times, patched stitched all of its petit body. The boy stared at it for a long time.
Shaking back into reality, he placed the elephant back into his bag. The boy got to his feet and slung his backpack over his shoulders. As he did, he could feel something rolling around in his coat pocket. He reached in and pulled it out.
It was a fortune cookie, somewhat squished with bits and pieces of it chipping off. Curious, he began to break it apart. A tiny slip of paper slid out into his hand and he unfolded it. Printed on it in bold black letters was:
“IF YOU’RE GOING THROUGH HELL, KEEP ON GOING!”
He closed his hand around the fortune tightly before placing it inside his empty locket and shutting it inside. Then, after taking a long, deep breath, he made his way towards the end of the church, pushed the large wooden doors apart and stepped outside into the ruins of New York City.
The boy shielded his eyes from the sudden burst of daylight. Squinting, he noticed a nearby sign, half embedded in the dirt, indicating that this was Staten Island. Or at least what was left of it. Stepping down from the stones steps outside the church, dust kicked up as his muddy hi-tops planted themselves into the soil. He could only speculate what this place could have been like before the war. Old timers usually whispered something about this city being known as ‘The Big Apple’. All it seemed to be now was a discarded, rotten core, withering away more and more as the days went on. However, if the rumors were true, then he was close to the place he was seeking…
Ahead of him was a debris ridden street. A flock of crows took off flapping in all directions at his sudden appearance. Aside from them, he was all alone in this dead, ghost town. It had been like this since before he was born and it would remain forgotten forever. The nukes made sure of that.
The metropolis known as New York City had been swallowed by the atomic fires of the Third World War. Buildings had been knocked down in the midst of the explosive shockwaves, toppling over any neighboring structures like oversized, concrete dominos. Loads of destroyed cars and other vehicles lay abandoned by their drivers in the streets. The boy could picture the stampede of panicking citizens running in the opposite direction of the blast, feebly attempting to escape the inferno.
As the boy stood outside the decimated church, he noticed a cemetery had been built nearby. A sea of tombstones, which had been reduced to mere piles of rubble, seemed to stretch on as far as the eye could see No one had come to visit them in years. No one had come to leave flowers or mourn their loved ones. Corpses of family members lay forgotten within the earth as did the town they once inhabited.
In the middle of the graveyard, something caught the young man’s attention. Towering over the rubble and debris was a statue. Although it had taken damage from the catastrophe that had befallen the city, it had somehow managed to stay in a good enough shape to appear mesmerizing before him. The statue was of a tall man, dressed in robes, holding up a long sword triumphantly. His long, curly hair flowed frozen in stone. His face, chipped and cracked, had still retained a look of bravery and courage even as it had begun to wither away.
A pair of long, feathery wings stretched out tremendously over the statue, as if they were ready to wave down and take off into the sky. He could only wonder what had kept them from crumble into pieces over the last few years. Inscribed on a plaque beneath the statue was: THE ARCHANGEL – SAINT MICHAEL
The statue looked as if it had been placed there to watch over those who had passed away, as a shepherd watches over and protects his flock, guiding them towards a higher plain of existence; The Afterlife.
The boy sneered at it. It was another desperate attempt of mankind to implore some kind of reason and hope into this twisted world. People wanted to have faith in something. They wanted to believe that there was more to the world then the chaos and bloodlust that took place everyday all across the glove. And so people invented God.
But the teen did not believe in God. He believed, plain and simple, that some people are able to endure the trials of life and manage to stay alive, while others, no matter how futilely they struggle or squirm against their fate, do not. Survival of the fittest. That was all.
Wasting no more time, the boy turned and headed down the road that awaited him. This place reeked of death and decay, as did the destroyed New Jersey he had ventured through only days earlier. The boy kept moving towards the north. His destination was even closer now; he could sense it. It was as if some kind of invisible force drew him into that direction like a magnet. Something deep inside him, though he knew not what it was, urged him onward…
***
That's all I have written so far so I apologize for all the questions you may have, but I plan to reveal the answers later on... Such as my protagonists name...
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
125,009 Literary Works • 672,837 Reviews
Ooh, well this is an interesting start. Your writing style is very good, and your descriptions paint a great picture of what's happening. Most of the things I picked out were nit-picks.
However, there are some things I'd like to bring up.
At the moment, you have enough enigmas to keep me interested to read more, but I have read many books and seen many films that start off in this empty post-apocalyptic world and end up trailing the same old story - you need to watch out for that. This could very easily become a cliche. I don't know if you know where you're going with this yet, but I'd avoid using overdone plots as it could make this very predictable.
The whole 'World War Three' thing is cliche, too, as it's been done to death. Could you make up your own name for the war that took place? This would also give your story another enigma as people can't relate a war from the past with the war in your story, and would seem a lot more effective for mood, if you know what I mean. It also means that you're not tied down by a reader's expectations of what a third world war would be like, because it's your own.
Have you read The Road by Cormac McCarthy? That's a great book, despite the author's annoying punctuation style, and mixes well-known plot ideas with new ones, creating something fresh. This is a good example of how a post-apocalyptic world can be used originally and interestingly. Don't go the same old trail of racing North to find some kind of paradise as that's just cliche - come up with something new or different. At the moment you have a solid start, with good characterisation - I can connect with your character even though I don't know his name, and I actually care what happens to him - and you seem to have the ability from what I've read.
Other little things are:
Make sure your sentences make sense. There were several cases where I didn't understand what you meant, and I pointed them out. I understand that sometimes you miss things, I have that difficulty, too, but try and read over each sentence when you write it and check that it makes sense on its own.
And you don't have a capital letter after a semi-colon.
Overall, I like what you have so far. Its interesting, raises questions that keeps the reader wanting to know more, and is written well. I hope this helps, and good luck with the rest of it.
I haven't written a review in a while, but I'll try too.
I like how you used the details of the setting and imagery to draw the reader into this story...
You have a good plot to start out with.
There wasn't much to say about this because I pretty much liked it.
Keep adding more each time you're online because I'd like to see what happens to him.
Ok this is the first review i've written in a while, but i'll try to make it good
i doubt there are any though, looking at the level of your writing.
Hmmm...well I'm no grammar expert and i have neither the attention span nor patience to pick through your writing searching frantically for tiny errors, so someone else who wants to can
Firstly what i like: I love the entire post-apocalyptic genre as a whole (if there is such a thing) so its a good sign that i'm feeling drawn to this writing and excited about what's going to happen. There are other individual things that are dotted around this writing that help this, but i really can't be bothered to find and list them. Overall i love it though, and i wanna see the rest of the story.
Here's some general advice i'd give you: if you're giving this guy a 'lone-wolf' personality, which suits this genre and style, then make sure you round him out a bit more. The child's toy is a good start to this, but just make sure you keep him more than one-dimensional, which can be trick i know :S.
On the more specific side, firstly with "its petit body" in the paragraph about the elephant, petit doesn't really work. Petit is used to describe young and beautiful women on the small side, not pink elephants :S.
Lastly, the fortune cookie. I don't want to sound too harsh here, but the rest of this passage is so atmospheric and well-written that the fortune cookies just sticks out ridiculously. It feels so forced and like it shouldn't be there. The reader gets the shock that he's carrying weapons, then the revealing of his sentimental side with the elephant and then suddenly BANG we're being force-fed (no pun intended) this cheap way of getting “IF YOU’RE GOING THROUGH HELL, KEEP ON GOING!” across. If you actually have to get this message across, do it with him reading a book or a sign or pretty much anything. It just shouldn't be there.
Overall though, i love this and i can't wait to read the next bit.
Baboon